Increased downtime, angry clients! These two terms don't sound very good for your business. Have a well-strategised release management plan but still not achieving the desired results? It's time to hire an experienced and skilled release manager.
But how do you identify which candidate/applicant is the best match for your job? We're here to help you with that!
The responsibilities of the release management team determine how efficiently changes get handled in your pre-production environments. However, the speed of change needs to align with the rapidly evolving demands. This can be challenging if you don't have a skilled and trained enterprise release manager.
Release managers should know their responsibilities and how to execute them accurately for optimal outcomes.
In this article, we'll discuss the roles and responsibilities of a release manager. They can strategise their work t fulfil your organisation's goals.
Let's get started!
What Phases Are Involved In The Release Management Process?
Building an outstanding application requires all the relevant teams and stakeholders to be on the same page. However, coordination and release workflow management might become more of a challenge when you need to function with a geographically distributed team.
Therefore, establishing a centralised release planning resource and information page is crucial. A centralised structure is the solution for various challenges in the release process, such as for project success and solves a variety of issues such as:
- Wasting software developer time to browse for information
- Missing out on important deadlines
- Overlooking project details (application development requirement or release criteria, etc.) that fall through the cracks
4 Steps For Improving Your Release Outcomes
For successful resolution of these challenges in the release workflow, your enterprise release manager can follow these four steps:
- Browse and gather ideas- Your release manager can analyse the historical data to understand what worked best for the team and what didn't. They can even research the best practices and strategies your competitors/industry giants are following.
- Draft release plan- the release plan should be a detailed document highlighting what workflows and practices need to be followed and who's responsible for which tasks. Also, important deadlines and requirements should be highlighted in the document.
- Convert your ideas into reality- This is where the actual management and tracking come into play. Your release manager needs to ensure the tasks are executed efficiently within the stipulated time without compromising the quality of the end product.
- Minimise your status meetings- The stakeholders and your clients have the right to know about the status of the application. However, frequent and unnecessary status meetings can waste your team's precious time. Instead, a centralised solution gives visibility to the stakeholders about the project status and enables you to minimise the status meetings. Invest in quality data compliance solutions to prevent complexities with data processing and data misuse.
Invest in quality data compliance solutions to prevent complexities with data processing and data misuse.
Roles And Responsibilities Of Enterprise Release Manager
The role of a release manager entails various responsibilities that require certain expertise and leadership skills. The fundamental job of your release manager is ensuring an efficient and seamless flow of updates/changes through any pre-production environment. A streamlined flow in the pre-production environment leads to successful releases.
Some roles and responsibilities of release manager include:
- Schedule, manage, track and coordinate releases for various applications in a particular portfolio or business division.
- Collaborate with IT release managers for developing a release calendar
- Assist in project management for enduring that milestone goals are fulfilled
- Risk mitigation and management
- Conduct project-related discussions, including release readiness reviews, milestone reviews, etc.
- Provide insights and reporting to Senior IT Management to keep them updated on the release status and outcomes.
Conclusion
A release manager needs to use the right set of tools to improve the efficiency of release workflows and enhance the success rate of application deployments. Release managers focusing on risk analysis and management, utilising risk reports and adhering to the protocols of data compliance solutions are often more productive and have successful outcomes.
Hire an experienced release manager for an efficient and successful release workflow.
